The Princess of Wales marked Anzac Day in London on Friday by laying a wreath at a memorial in Whitehall before attending a Westminster Abbey service to commemorate the war dead of Australia and New Zealand. Catherine’s wreath carried a note signed by her and Prince William, paying tribute to soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
The wreath was a ring of poppies with white flowers depicting the feathers of the Prince of Wales' crest. At Whitehall, Reverend Dr Lyndon Drake recited from The Fallen by poet Laurence Binyon, a Royal Marines Portsmouth Road Band trumpeter played the Last Post before a one-minute silence, and the high commissioners for New Zealand and Australia, Hamish Cooper and Jay Weatherill, laid their own wreaths. Catherine then joined other attendees in singing O God Our Help in Ages Past before the military march to Westminster Abbey, and after the service she spoke with some of the military families.
Princess Anne also marked the day at a dawn service at Wellington Arch in London, organized by the New Zealand and Australian high commissions, where she laid a wreath and the service concluded with the national anthems of the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Earlier in the morning, the dawn service included a reading of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, while commemorations were also held across New Zealand, Australia and on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey on Saturday morning, as well as in Villers-Bretonneux in France.
Anzac Day honours the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who served and died in all wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations. The day still carries the weight of the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli, which lasted into 1916 and cost more than 100,000 troops their lives in a failed British-led campaign to seize a route through the Dardanelles. The Royal Family said in a post on X that the commemoration is for those who served and died in those conflicts, and London’s ceremonies made that remembrance visible in the centre of the capital. Catherine’s tribute was not just ceremonial; it placed her alongside that history and the families who still carry it.